Gardens: World

11/18/2011

Today's post was inspired by a comment from a U.K. reader, Jerome Fletcher. Mr. Fletcher pointed me to the Scottish poet Ian Hamilton Finlay, who first gained renown in the 1960s as a practitioner of concrete poetry. Concrete poetry is the kind in which the layout and typography are part of the poem's meaning, so that it is a visual as well as linguistic object. Here is one of Finlay's "poster poems," called "Acrobats:"

Its language not only describes but enacts tumbling, rendering the materiality of words concrete.

But sometimes Finlay (who died in 2006) actually makes poems out of concrete, or stone, or wood. At Little Sparta, the garden he created in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh with his wife and collaborator Sue Finlay, garden spaces are designed around sculptural pieces engraved with poems. (These great photos by Andrew Lawson are all from the Little Sparta Trust website.)

In this way, Little Sparta (so named in contrast to nearby Edinburgh, "the Athens of the North," with whom Finlay had been in decades-long conflict over issues of zoning and taxes) participates in a long tradition of poet-philosophers' gardens going back to classical times and epitomized in the eighteenth century by William Shenstone's The Leasowes.

Finlay's themes include pre-Socratic views of nature, the French Revolution, World War II, and the sea. (Click on these horizontally-oriented shots to see them at full width.)

He works with master stonemasons and woodcarvers to produce virtuoso works of art.

05/13/2011

My friend Deb Paredez alerted me to an article in the New York Times this week describing the Chinese authorities' crackdown on flowering jasmine.

After Tunisians dubbed their anti-government uprising earlier this year the Jasmine Revolution, calls went out on Chinese social media that those who wanted to protest government censorship of the Internet and other abuses should stroll silently through the city streets, carrying a jasmine flower. In response, the government forbade the sale of jasmine. Of course, many vendors are too busy working to have gotten the memo about what was wrong with their staple commodity, and were confused when the bottom suddenly fell out of the market for China's most iconic flower.

Rumors abound: jasmine is said to be contaminated by radiation from Japan, or to contain a poison that is making people sick. Even those that have heard that jasmine is now seen as a symbol of revolution find the idea silly. After all, a song about the beauty of the jasmine flower, "Mo Li Hua" (sung here by no other than President Hu Jintao!) is practically China's national anthem, having been sung during the Olympics whenever a Chinese athlete won a medal. And the China International Jasmine Cultural Festival--cancelled this year--celebrates the ubiquity of the flower in Chinese art, medicine, food, and everyday life. At a recent festival, one of the biggest stars was singer Song Zuyong, "Beautiful Jasmine Flower."

In fact, jasmine seems like a good symbol of the impossibility of ever completely repressing the human spirit. Despite offical bans on buying or selling the flower, the Times reports that with prices so low, many Chinese still could not resist buying jasmine. You can't keep a good plant down.

Conniff is responding to reader complaints about his statement that the nineteenth-century French naturalist Père Armand David had “discovered” the snub-nosed golden monkey. Rather, a reader suggests, the Chinese themselves discovered the monkey, since they were observing it for centuries, long before Europeans even knew there was a China.

Wrong, says Conniff. While it is true that early naturalists in China and elsewhere “displayed plenty of colonial arrogance,” their introduction of local knowledge of flora and fauna into today’s universally-used system of scientific classification is the only kind of knowledge that counts as “discovery.” “If David had not brought them to the attention of the outside world,” he asserts, “many of his new species—among them the giant panda—would in fact now be lost.”

He doesn’t give any evidence for this conclusion and it’s hard to imagine how you could possibly know for sure which events in the nineteenth century led directly to the preservation of the giant panda. Arguments like Conniff’s strive to seem reasonable, even-handed, and impartial, avoiding the “misguided” “revisionist appeal” of attempts to value local knowledge as its own kind of science. But in addition to dismissing the thousands of years of culture and civilization lying behind the work of the uncredited Chinese hunters who brought David his specimens, Conniff’s approach fails to see that “scientific knowledge” has a history that has shaped it in peculiar ways we often fail to recognize because we are inside that history.

(Père Armand David in European and Chinese dress. He wore the latter to facilitate his explorations.)

For example, when the Linnaean system of sexual classification was first introduced into England in the 18th century, it created a backlash against its perceived sexual immorality. Women botanists such as Mary Delany and the Duchess of Portland, who identified their specimens by how they reproduced, were considered to be doing something scandalously sexual. Delany’s Magnolia Grandiflora and Papaver Somniferum were the kinds of images critics called “libertine” because they emphasized the plant’s reproductive features. Turning the flower outward toward the viewer, as Delany does, made these images uncomfortably close to women’s sexual anatomy for many eighteenth-century viewers.

Landscape poet Anna Seward, later in the century, signaled her radical politics and support of women’s education by criticizing those who thought the purity of young women would be ruined by investigating plants. “Do not suppose,” she scoffed, “that a virtuous girl, or young married woman, could be induced…to imitate the involuntary libertinism of a fungus or a flower.”

Conniff would say that since we no longer believe this, the system works. I would say it simply shows that Western scientific traditions have their own blind spots and should not be uncritically celebrated as universal.

The binomial system of nomenclature that descends from the eighteenth century's Linnaenism is what Conniff calls "giving your find a name, by genus and species." This, for him, is the only activity that counts as "discovery." Before David, Europeans who had seen pictures of the mountain-dwelling monkeys, with their blue, snubbed noses and bright red manes, believed them to be a figment of the Chinese imagination. Conniff says it was the French priest who proved them wrong. How ironic that he did so using a system regarded as immoral by many Europeans. And how unfortunate that the Chinese themselves, and the scientific, literary and pictorial records they created, were seen as fictional, while "the involuntary libertinism of a fungus" is considered impartial knowledge.

02/07/2011

Edward James was born in 1907 and was an Oxford contemporary of Evelyn Waugh and Harold Acton. A patron of the arts, poet, and designer, he is known as an ardent Surrealist. In collaboration with Salvador Dalí, James created iconic works like the Mae West Lips Sofa and the Lobster Telephone (also known as the Aphrodisiac Telephone).

One of four known copies of the Telephone can be viewed at James’ estate at West Dean, now a National Trust site. The site is known for its nineteenth-century Gothic house designed by James Wyatt and a twentieth-century Arts and Crafts garden. René Magritte painted two portraits of James, both expressing a mysterious or unknowable quality about him.

James married Tilly Losch, an Austrian dancer, in the early 1930s, and produced Les Ballets 1933, which included Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, and George Balanchine, as a vehicle for her. In 1934, in a divorce countersuit, Tilly accused him of homosexuality. In 1940, James stayed for a period at the Taos, New Mexico ranch of bisexual Mabel Dodge Luhan, which housed a revolving guest lists of avant-garde artists. Travels in Mexico convinced him that in order to design the “true Garden of Eden” he had in mind, “Mexico was far more romantic” a location than either Britain or the United States. In 1945, guided by a young telegraph operator named Plutarco Gastelum whom he had hired in Cuernavaca, James found the location of the garden he was to name Las Pozas (“the pools”) at Xilitla. This is the James garden I nominate “queer,” if only for its Surrealist vibe of sexual freakiness and its origins in a collaboration between men.

Gustelem, his wife and children lived with James at Laz Pozas for the next forty years. Gustelem and James collaborated on nearly forty concrete follies (garden buildings including temples, pagodas and summerhouses) with names like The House on Three Floors Which Will In Fact Have Five or Four or Six. Plantings included an orchid collection that at one time numbered 29,000 specimens, and “casas” or animal houses housed wild birds and animals from all over the world.

James was also a poet. Here are some verses about his garden:

I have seen such beauty as one man has seldom seen;

therefore will I be grateful to die in this little room,

surrounded by the forests, the great green gloom

of trees my only gloom - and the sound, the sound of green.

Here amid the warmth of the rain, what might have been

is resolved into the tenderness of a tall doom

who says: 'You did your best, rest' - and after you the bloom

of what you loved and planted still will whisper what you mean.

And the ghosts of the birds I loved, will attend me each a friend;

like them shall I have flown beyond the realm of words.

You, through the trees, shall hear them, long after the end

calling me beyond the river. For the cries of birds

continue, as - defended by the cortege of their wings -

my soul among strange silences yet sings.

Here's James at Las Pozas in the 1980s:

Thanks to Roberto Tejada for introducing me to Las Pozas. Now run by a foundation, the garden is open to visitors. I’m adding it to my list of lifetime garden tourism/research destinations. I’ll be able to visit West Dean this summer when I’m in England and will be sure to report any features that set off my garden-writer gaydar.